Nissan Plans For Self-Driving Cars By 2020

Nissan said it will be ready to bring fully self-driving vehicles to market by 2020.

The Japanese automaker said it plans to offer "multiple, commercially viable" vehicles that are capable of autonomous operation without driver input.

"We've announced we'll introduce autonomous drive vehicle by 2020 and we said that within two vehicle life-cyles we'll make that technology available across that entire portfolio," said Nissan Executive Vice President Andy Palmer in a video handout published on the Nissan website on Tuesday (August 27).

He called for a change in road regulations to allow this car in the future.

"What we now need is regulatory changes that allow us to deploy that," Palmer said.

In the online video release the company showed their car being able to drive and turn while the driver took his hands off the wheel.

The video also showed that it can avoid a pedestrian dummy that jumped out on to the road at a test drive the company identifies as Nissan 360 in Southern California.

The company said it has been researching and developing autonomous vehicles "for years" with universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Oxford, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Tokyo. It is building a dedicated test track in Japan for autonomous vehicles that will be completed by next spring.

Google launched an autonomous car program in 2010 and has built and is testing several different versions, including one based on Toyota's Prius.

Nissan says car crashes are the top leading cause of deaths in the U.S. of people between the age of four and 34. It said 93 percent of all accidents, are due to human error, typically due to inattention and that they hope by taking the wheel away from the drivers, they will be able to greatly reduce the number of car accident fatalities every year.